Tag Archives: glorious

My Mom made me these sandwiches this past summer to take with me to the summer ranch. You see, my Dad is notorious for making us work all day, by his side, then when it comes to dinner, he expects us to cook it for everyone. My Mom did her best to mitigate this for me by sending casseroles, sandwiches and other lovely and delicious pre-cooked food so I wouldn’t flip out when my Dad expected me to cook for the camp after doing the same work he did.

I LOVE King’s products! I’m sorry this is a crap picture! But it’s all I had!

This is one of the recipes I asked her to make again and again, because it was really easy and sooooooo gooooood. She assembled everything for me, I took it with me to the summer ranch, and popped it in the oven when we got hungry.

We’ve been pig owners for a whole week now. It’s been glorious. I heart pigs. I missed having pigs! It has been an adjustment, for sure! I’ve had to wake up before daylight in order to feed them, take a shower, put on office appropriate-non pig smelling clothes, make-up and still get to work on time. On the plus side, I’ve been so paranoid about getting this done on time, I’ve been early to work all week, score!

Some updates. Char (the runt) is at Kristen’s house because he needed some TLC. He held his own, but the red wattle/tamworths out grew him. He is spending a few days with Kristen and then he will come home to his own little pen until he can run with the big boys. I’ve asked Kristen to write a blog post about being the hospital pen, so look forward to that. I believe Mahina is working on a post too, exciting!

This is why the red wattle are called red WATTLES (the wattles).

Kristen’s sister, Rachel, came over to meet the pigs. She said it was the first time she touched a pig (guess who is doing adult 4-H next time?!?!), she won for quote of the day. Rachel please don’t kill me for sharing this, but it was super awesome:

“It honked at me!!!” – Rachel (meaning it grunted at her)

The pigs are eating very well!

Right now they are eating about 1.5 pounds of this morning and night. And pretty much eating and growing more and more every day. YAY!

This is what their food looks like. They like to stand in it.

Like all kids, they eat, then nap;

Our little sausage links!

Kristen and her sister came over and fed them Oreos (we tried gummi’s, cake, marshmallows, white bread, and fruit with no luck), effectively ‘breaking’ the pigs. They now realize we are the bringers of food and attention and they dig it.

This piggy likes the filling. He’ll put his lips around the cookie, then expects you to drag it out of his mouth (notice the frosting lips).

His brother just liked the cookie part. It was perfect.

We want the pigs to be tame enough to like us, but not be pets. We want low stress, happy pigs when we move them and work with them, but not pigs that we get really attached to, it’s a fine line.

Just call her the pig whisperer.

After a week of living here we figured the pigs were ready to use their whole pen. The pen is about 3/4 of an acre, about half of which was scraped because the weeds were just too much to deal with for such little piggies. Mahina and I moved pig panels so they now have access to this whole area. Of course the first place they wanted to go was…

…into the weeds! Totally scared me! I was looking for foxtails in their ears and eyes, but they seemed to be ok!

It was the best day of their lives – so much rooting going on! I spent my morning picking pecans for them and hiding them in the dirt (it was better than therapy!), anyway the pigs think they have died and gone to heaven rooting up rocks and looking for pecans.

Pigs rooting and looking for nuts.

They will get another few weeks in this pen before we start making portable pens around oaks trees and pecan trees so they can graze and root during the days. We are waiting for them to gain a little more weight and for the weather to change a whisper more, so the nuts drop. I also need to borrow my Dad’s truck and horse trailer to get the panels, unless, you know, he wants to do that for me (hint). In addition to the pasture and nuts they will continue to get their pig grower feed.